Friday, November 24, 2017

Where Have All the People Gone (1972)

directed by John Llewellyn Moxley
USA
74 minutes
3 stars out of 5
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A good movie for those who are fatigued from the Black Friday crowds today, considering it takes place in a world with almost no people whatsoever.

Apparently this was a made-for-TV movie, although its content is a bit different from what I'd think to expect flipping through channels for a movie to watch. It's about a band of survivors trekking through California after some mysterious solar event wipes out a large portion of the population, and up until its suspiciously optimistic ending, it's actually pretty grim. Save for Peter Graves' hair. You could power a whole city on how bright that man's hair is.

This movie shows a little bit of the American attitude of the time towards nuclear bombs and the threat of war, and the characters have an obvious bias towards their own country in terms of who they believe can and can't have a bomb dropped on them. They all have a kind of "immunity"/"accident" attitude, wherein nothing could possibly happen to the USA, they're "immune", so any nuclear disaster that might be to blame for their circumstances must certainly be an accident. I don't even think they refer directly to being bombed, they either say it's a nuclear accident or assume it's the army testing something nearby- which by itself has a lot of connotations about the license the military gets to do whatever they want, but I won't get into that now. At one point one of the characters is brooding about her situation and mentions having seen "some pictures of Hiroshima", but if she'd really seen those photos, she would have recognized that the area her group was in couldn't have been atom-bombed, because trees would be flattened and there would be significantly more smoldering wreckage in and around their persons.

This isn't a bad movie, and it's fun to imagine viewers in the 70s having their day interrupted by this drama about a group of people coming to terms with the death of their loved ones along with nearly everybody else in the world, but it's too lighthearted and vaguely nationalistic to feel like a good exploration of war or even a good exploration of solar flares. This certainly couldn't have been made today, considering how the widespread nature of the internet makes the importance of electricity even more dire now than in 1974. And the ending is almost comically out of left field- the characters disregard practical difficulties and suddenly assume everything will be perfectly fine. "Well, we'll just have to get to farming! What do you mean by minimum viable population size?"

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